Maggie's Farm

Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in The New English Review. One quote:

The knights who entered combat against Muslims and pagans did so for Christian objectives. This led to a radical change in Christian thinking about war. Before the Crusades, the Church was ambivalent about killing and wounding in war. St. Augustine helped to formulate the idea of a “just war" by arguing that killing carried out in obedience to divine command or legitimate public authority did not violate the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."[14] Nevertheless, even a “just war” did not receive the Church’s wholehearted approval. A war that the Church promoted and blessed, such as the First Crusade, had been unthinkable.

Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). was the prelate most responsible for the Church’s changed attitude towards war.[15] One of his favorite quotations from Scripture was “Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood.” (Jeremiah 48:10).[16] Gregory proclaimed a new type of Christian soldier-saint.[17] Before Gregory, Saint George and Saint Sebastian had become saints in spite of having been soldiers. As a result of his teachings, men became saints because they had been soldiers. The long-range consequences of this transformation remain with us to this day.

Pic is a crowded Cape Cod beach - the bay, at Wellfleet. Duck Harbor. You can walk it for hours, if you bring enough water. Can take dogs there, off leash of course. Do dogs love that? Guess. At low tide, it is dog heaven.

I have all of these books, and love them:

Beston: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Richardson: The House on Nauset Marsh: A Cape Cod Memoir

Schwind: Cape Cod Fisherman

Henry David Thoreau: Cape Cod

Schneider: The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket

Mitcham's Provincetown Seafood Cookbook. His Kale Soup and Haddock Amondine, along with all the rest of his Portuguese-influenced recipes - are immortal, but his Baked Stuffed Cod is the best. The whole Cape area has lots of Portuguese descended from the visiting Cod fishermen (Emeril, from Fall River, is one.) Interesting fellow, Mitcham. Highly productive in his life; rarely, if ever, sober from what I heard. Dead now, at 77.

I have a few other out of print Cape Cod area history books that I won't link because even Abe's doesn't have then.

It's been quite a while since we've had a Pepy's Diary post, but this piece of his blog post from June 19, 1668, amused me:

I home, and there we to bed again, and slept pretty well, and about nine rose, and then my wife fell into her blubbering again, and at length had a request to make to me, which was, that she might go into France, and live there, out of trouble; and then all come out, that I loved pleasure and denied her any, and a deal of do; and I find that there have been great fallings out between my father and her, whom, for ever hereafter, I must keep asunder, for they cannot possibly agree. And I said nothing, but, with very mild words and few, suffered her humour to spend, till we begun to be very quiet, and I think all will be over, and friends, and so I to the office, where all the morning doing business.

Plus sa change, plus c'est la meme chose. Sam is frequently figuring out how to deal with Mrs. P's complaints and discontents. He liked to hang out with jovial, cheerful folks between business or government deals, often returning home late from the theater or from taverns in a well-lubricated condition.

One can spend many enjoyable hours keeping up with Sam's diaries, which are more interesting - and better-written - than any Tweets or Facebook posts you will ever read. He did love life, and entered fully into it with a sense of fun and with enough discipline to make it work.

Grids vs. no grids, at Old Urbanist:

Interestingly, NYC's Broadway was an old Lenape Indian trail into the Bronx and Westchester, later extended by the Dutch to run up to the Dutch settlement of Albany (the current Rte. 9).

We now call the North River the Hudson River. The road along the wall is Wall St. That canal, now filled in, is Broad St. Another Dutch canal further uptown, long filled in, is now Canal St.

More fun old Manhattan maps here.

Referring to real Black Bears, not financial bears - in what year was the last bear on Manhattan killed?

And roughly when, the last wolf?

Came home from a busy, delightful, and exertional family day to notice some of Mrs. BD's Digitalis in glorious bloom.

Whenever I see Digitalis - Foxglove - in bloom I remember "the Shropshire Crone," renowned in medical history for promoting the use of it for "dropsy" - congestive heart failure. The astute and open-minded Dr. William Withering took notice and got all of the credit - hence the continued use of Digitalis for heart failure. Many people we see walking around would be either dead or bed-ridden without this herbal treatment. Digitalis increases the contractility of the failing heart, but in higher doses it kills you.

Digitalis is a biennial, and self-sows generously when in a happy spot - half-day sun, rich soil. That is Nepeta in bloom in the foreground, and the low-growing Little Lamb's Ear Hydrangea on the left, which will bloom white in late summer.

Up here in the land of snow, we treasure our gardens especially because our growing season is so darn short. Our plants have to know how to carpe diem even if we do not. We try to learn from them. Winter is coming.

Snap above is on the country road in the hilly Tiber Valley driving from Todi to Montefalco, with the charming town of Todi in the distance, on the hill. Italy is good about having a sharp distinction between town and country. Little-to-no sprawl. Except in the big cities, you go from urban density directly to vineyards, olive groves, or forests full of deer, cinghiale, eagles, even wolves and, best of all, the ferocious and dangerously-expensive Wild Black Truffle. People like to live in towns, where they can walk to work and shop, and can say bon giorno to their neighbors.

Bit of history

A quick history and geography of Umbria in central Italy, northeast of Rome, to put my forthcoming travel pics in context. It is generally similar to the history of the entire area we now term Italy.

Central Italy was the prehistoric land of the Etruscans (hence "Tuscany" - land of the Etruscans) and of the less-known Umbri. They were, relatively speaking, peaceful and prosperous farmers and traders. When Rome began its imperial expansion around 250 BC, Umbria up along the old trading route to the Adriatic (which the Romans later termed the Via Flaminia) seemed like an obvious target.

The Romans did their Roman thing there for 600 years until the empire began to unwind and Goths and Lombards moved into Tuscany and Umbria both by immigration and by arms in the 400s-500s. In many ways, these waves of invasion became sort of Romanized and Christianized, in time. The Byzantines were in the mix then, too.

Warring feudal duchys and kingdoms dominated the dark ages in this part of Italy, during a time when the declining Roman regions were also set upon by piratical Saracens (mainly seeking slaves for the Middle Eastern slave trade) and Normans (seeking adventure), until Papal power exerted itself and built an authoritarian, theocratic peace by the 1100s and 1200s. They were big on building castles with which to assert their powerful churchly presence, but from the days of the late empire people were building their own keeps and walls to defend themselves from foreigners and also from their neighboring towns. The Roman Legions had previously made walls and keeps unnecessary: the Roman armies had been the wall. The Pax Romana.

The Papal State pretty much controlled central Italy, perhaps to its detriment, until the Italian nation was invented 150 years ago. Roman Catholicism was pretty much corrupted by money and politics, during that era, including the Benedictines. 

2011 is the 150th anniversary of that political event. Garibaldi, etc.

Geography

Geographically, southern Umbria divides itself into three regions: The north-south-running Tiber Valley where the Tiber flows south towards Rome, the fertile north-south running Valle Umbra which is like a mini version of California's Central Valley, and the eastern Valnerina which is the area in the majestic Appennines where the river Nera flows down to eventually join and magnify the Tiber.

We visited and stayed in incredible hotels in each of those three areas of Umbria. As in Roman times, rural and quaint Umbria is a popular Roman getaway place, full of bikers, motorcyclists, foodies, and hikers. It's only a 2 or 3 hour drive from Rome, and it is packed with "unspoiled gems." 

Most of the towns were Umbrian first, Roman later, and then Medieval-Renaissance. Except for towns damaged by the war (like Terni) or by earthquakes (like Foligno), there is a lot of Renaissance, generally built on Medieval town footprints.

Except for Assisi with its bus-loads of pilgrims, we saw few non-Italian tourists and only one American couple - friendly folks from Montgomery, Alabama! Some Brits, Aussies, Austrians, and Dutch. We tend to meet people when we travel. That's part of the fun.

Todi, Amelia, Orvieto, Montefalco, and Perugia are on hills in the Tiber Valley. Towns in Umbria tended to be built on hills for defensive purposes, which is why exploring Italy is such a good physical workout. Assisi, Spoleto, Spello, and Terni are along the western edge of the Apennines where they rise from the plain. Norcia, and our monastery hotel, are in the mountains themselves near where the Nera emerges from the mountains.

Weather

Best times for Italy or any Mediterranean travel are Spring and Fall. May and October are perfect. Italy climate here.

I will have lots more fun travel pics soon - Pic below of the Valle Umbra, looking west from the Assisi hillside:

Pic below from the garden of our 6th C. Benedictine monastery hotel in the Valnerina in the Apennines, with a small hillside olive grove (doubling as parking area) below the wall. It is no wonder that people love to visit Italy: it has the food, the history, the scenery, the quaintness, the vino, the art and architecture, and the delightfully tough and fashionable Italian gals.

"Once each May, amid the quiet hills and rolling lanes and breeze-brushed trees of Arlington National Cemetery, far above the majestic Potomac and the monuments and memorials of our Nation's Capital just beyond, the graves of America's military dead are decorated with the beautiful flag that in life these brave souls followed and loved. This scene is repeated across our land and around the world, wherever our defenders rest. Let us hold it our sacred duty and our inestimable privilege on this day to decorate these graves ourselves -- with a fervent prayer and a pledge of true allegiance to the cause of liberty, peace, and country for which America's own have ever served and sacrificed. ... Our pledge and our prayer this day are those of free men and free women who know that all we hold dear must constantly be built up, fostered, revered and guarded vigilantly from those in every age who seek its destruction. We know, as have our Nation's defenders down through the years, that there can never be peace without its essential elements of liberty, justice and independence. Those true and only building blocks of peace were the lone and lasting cause and hope and prayer that lighted the way of those whom we honor and remember this Memorial Day. To keep faith with our hallowed dead, let us be sure, and very sure, today and every day of our lives, that we keep their cause, their hope, their prayer, forever our country's own."

Ronald Reagan

Mrs. BD and I have been taking the William and Mary course in Medieval History (with the delightfully Asperger's-ish Prof. Daileader via The Teaching Company) and we are enjoying it immensely. I do not like to sit unless I am at work, but this course gets me into a chair after work. (We live and thrive on the Teaching Company courses at my cottage, as readers know.)

The Prof says that the wealth of the Middle Ages came from a combination of trade and the renewal of currency in the form of the Italian Florin, the introduction of the heavy plow, the replacement of slavery with serfdom, a doubling of Europe's population - and the Medieval Warm Period which made it possible to grow better crops much further north than in the Dark Ages - and further north than today. Greenland was farmland.

The Warm Period was far warmer than the world today. People benefited. That's why we pray for Global Warming (but also doubt that humankind will be so lucky. With our luck, we'll get the next Ice Age and all be screwed except for Dr. Merc).

From Front Porch Republic's History’s Long Road to Tyranny: Tocqueville and the End of Equality:

...the primacy of local or township government in American society made it possible for a great number of Americans to participate in political institutions on a regular basis.  Whether as Fire Chief or head of the St. John’s Mint Festival, whether as Dog Catcher or Mayor, Americans were continually forced to turn away from themselves and to attend to the life and business of their neighbor.  The long habit of such participation in public life convinced Americans that, despite their equality, they need not and could not be indifferent to the particulars of social life.  This also preserved Americans from the tendency to invest their political beliefs in a few general ideas.  Accustomed to the details of daily participation in political life, they did not let what is often called (wrongly, I think) “ideology” substitute for active engagement in the public realm.  This was possible chiefly because the actions of political life were largely confined to the local level, even when the legislation directing that life occured far away.

Almost finished putting the Christmas stuff away, and amusing myself by refreshing my memory about Henry Hudson's voyages.

Given what a careful exploration he did, I am surprised he never ventured up the St. Lawrence, which Cartier had discovered in 1535 and which Champlain was exploring at the same time as Hudson's trip. Also, I am reminded that the English Jamestown settlement existed a couple of years before his Dutch-sponsored 1609 trip, and that the West Indies, South America, and even Peru had been settled by Spanish long before, in the 1500s.

The Spanish knew where the gold was, and it wasn't in New England.

A reader suggested that I stop by Lepcis Magna (aka Leptis Magna, aka Neapolis) while visiting North Africa.

Not a bad idea, but I have seen tons of Roman ruins from England to Pompeii to North Africa, and they're all about the same: an arena, a forum, a bath, a few monuments and lots of columns, etc. The ones in Carthage were cool.

I prefer seeing Greek things, and it seems like it would be a shame to go through life without seeing ancient Egyptian things in situ.

Where I want to poke around, from the Romans, is Ostia.

We posted on a visit to Ostia a few years ago.

At Smithsonian. Always wondered how they filled that space with water for the mock sea battles.

That's what Freud wrote on his Austrian exit papers, when the Gestapo informed him that he could finally leave if he would put in writing that he had been treated well by them in the lengthy process. The grim sarcasm, no doubt, went over the heads of the Gestapo thugs.

Freud had a wry sense of humor which was rarely evident in his writing. He was 82 at the time, the Anschluss had happened, and his friends like Ernest Jones had to drag him out of Vienna to London, with the assistance of Pres. Roosevelt.

Fearful as he was of growing anti-Semitic sentiment, he did not want to leave home.

The NYT announced his departure on June 5, 1938. He died a year later, in London.

Praising the Puritans, at First Things (h/t, AVI). Lawler begins:

There’s little less fashionable today than praising the Puritans, especially for their egalitarian political idealism, their promotion of genuinely humane and liberating learning, and their capacity for enjoyment and human happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult for us because even most of our Protestants have abandoned them. When a European calls us Puritanical we don’t say, “yes, thanks a lot, you’re right.” Instead, we either deny it, saying we’re way beyond those days. Or we admit it, saying that, “yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you.” But the truth is that the Puritans remain the chief source of the American difference—our ability to live freely and prosperously without unduly slighting the longings of our souls. It’s the Puritans’ idealism that made and even makes Americans civilized.

Read the whole thing. I do not know how, or whether, immigrants to the US can, or have been able to, or even want to, learn the code. I sure hope they can.

Picture is Jonathan Edwards, a member of the Maggie's Farm pantheon. You would not know from the prissy portrait, but he loved to have fun.

I am re-posting this because, as I slowly get through it (slowly because there is so much in it - I am reading it every night), I appreciate it more and more. Some of you cultural history types might put it on a Christmas list.

Another book I am reading, with far more pleasure than the gruesome After the Reich, is Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.

Since there was no real idea of "Germany" as a nation until 1817 (The Deutscher Bund), and no modern nation of Germany until 1871, the book is mostly about German culture (which preceded any German nation and which continues to exist beyond the boundaries of modern Germany - Austria, northeast Italy, Switzerland, the entire diaspora of German Jews, etc).

From the review in The Guardian:

So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K�rper" in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German.

His chapter on German Idealism is especially good. Hegel and his brethren inform our thinking today far more than I realized.

This is a re-post:

One historical detail I picked up in reading Philbrick's wonderful Mayflower is that the Pilgrims only permitted civil marriage ceremonies - no religion involved, and no preacher present.

As Calvinists, the Pilgrims/Puritans/Separatists of colonial New England viewed the Anglican sacraments as Papist, and thus representative of the Anti-Christ - and they meant it. As a consequence, Congregational Churches, the heirs of the Puritan movement, still have no sacraments per se, although many have liberalized (or backslided?) to the extent of doing baptism, communion - and, of course, weddings which, even if not technically sacramental, are viewed as sacred vows. People long for a touch of the sacred and sacramental.

It is fascinating to be reminded that our nation's deepest roots are in Calvinist theocracy: pre-enlightenment, for better or worse. They viewed the Indians as equals (though living in spiritual darkness), but they hung some Quakers in Boston�as blasphemers (but mainly tried to just send them away).

They even hung an ancestor of mine, who ran away from her husband and kids in Kingston, Rhode Island and was caught on a trail outside of Boston, headed north. Her crime? She refused to return home. We suspect she was not overly fond of her husband, who had previously been suspected of throwing his first wife overboard on the way to Rhode Island in 1640.

When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).

What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.

The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.

The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.

The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.

Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).

Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.

This site has some good posts on the topic of Moodus' destruction, including:

Pt 1. Legacy of "Progress" Gone Sour

Pt 2. Urban Renewal Flops in Moodus

Pt 3. Could Moodus Have Been Saved?

A quote:

Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."

Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.

I am reading - or trying to read - McDonogh's 2007 After The Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. It's about the horrors inflicted on ethnic Germans by the Allies in the years following WW2. Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany.

This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read.

Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Read the whole brief review to get an idea.

Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions).

As I live and learn, I no longer view Roman civilization as "ancient." Old, but not ancient. Those folks were a lot like us, and lived a lot like us.

Roman floor mosaics and wall paintings were the usual fashionable decor of the time, and typical for the homes of the prosperous. Naturally, the floor mosaics are better preserved than wall mosaics or wall paintings.

In 2009 we were fortunate to make our way to the Bardo Museum in Tunis to see the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. They have so many, you even walk on them to get from one display room to another. This was decor, mind you - not fine art.

The Lod mosaics are a recent find, very-well preserved. They are now displayed in NYC.

Here's the story of the Lod mosaics.

Came in over the transom with the video:

The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter  planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed. 

In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and  had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy.  Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement.  When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would  be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.

When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low  level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the  RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane).  At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.

One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.

The video here: http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500